In the spring of 2017, in a room on the second floor of Google's Building 1965, a college intern named Aidan Gomez stretched out, exhausted. It was three in the morning, and Gomez and Ashish Vaswani, a scientist focussed on natural language processing, were working on their team's contribution to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, the biggest annual meeting in the field of artificial intelligence. Along with the rest of their eight-person group at Google, they had been pushing flat out for twelve weeks, sometimes sleeping in the office, on couches by a curtain that had a neuron-like pattern. They were nearing the finish line, but Gomez didn't have the energy to go out to a bar and celebrate. He couldn't have even if he'd wanted to: he was only twenty, too young to drink in the United States.

Dense image prediction tasks demand features with strong category information and precise spatial boundary details at high resolution. To achieve this, modern hierarchical models often utilize feature fusion, directly adding upsampled coarse features from deep layers and high-resolution features from lower levels. In this paper, we observe rapid variations in fused feature values within objects, resulting in intra-category inconsistency due to disturbed high-frequency features. Additionally, blurred boundaries in fused features lack accurate high frequency, leading to boundary displacement. Building upon these observations, we propose Frequency-Aware Feature Fusion (FreqFusion), integrating an Adaptive Low-Pass Filter (ALPF) generator, an offset generator, and an Adaptive High-Pass Filter (AHPF) generator. The ALPF generator predicts spatially-variant low-pass filters to attenuate high-frequency components within objects, reducing intra-class inconsistency during upsampling. The offset generator refines large inconsistent features and thin boundaries by replacing inconsistent features with more consistent ones through resampling, while the AHPF generator enhances high-frequency detailed boundary information lost during downsampling. Comprehensive visualization and quantitative analysis demonstrate that FreqFusion effectively improves feature consistency and sharpens object boundaries. Extensive experiments across various dense prediction tasks confirm its effectiveness. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/FreqFusion.

This paper presents the External Attention Vision Transformer (EAViT) model, a novel approach designed to enhance audio classification accuracy. As digital audio resources proliferate, the demand for precise and efficient audio classification systems has intensified, driven by the need for improved recommendation systems and user personalization in various applications, including music streaming platforms and environmental sound recognition. Accurate audio classification is crucial for organizing vast audio libraries into coherent categories, enabling users to find and interact with their preferred audio content more effectively. In this study, we utilize the GTZAN dataset, which comprises 1,000 music excerpts spanning ten diverse genres. Each 30-second audio clip is segmented into 3-second excerpts to enhance dataset robustness and mitigate overfitting risks, allowing for more granular feature analysis. The EAViT model integrates multi-head external attention (MEA) mechanisms into the Vision Transformer (ViT) framework, effectively capturing long-range dependencies and potential correlations between samples. This external attention (EA) mechanism employs learnable memory units that enhance the network's capacity to process complex audio features efficiently. The study demonstrates that EAViT achieves a remarkable overall accuracy of 93.99%, surpassing state-of-the-art models.

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a new era of Natural Language Processing (NLP), introducing unprecedented capabilities that are revolutionizing various domains. This paper explores the current state of these cutting-edge technologies, demonstrating their remarkable advancements and wide-ranging applications. Our paper contributes to providing a holistic perspective on the technical foundations, practical applications, and emerging challenges within the evolving landscape of Generative AI and LLMs. We believe that understanding the generative capabilities of AI systems and the specific context of LLMs is crucial for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to collaboratively shape the responsible and ethical integration of these technologies into various domains. Furthermore, we identify and address main research gaps, providing valuable insights to guide future research endeavors within the AI research community.

The emergence of text-to-image synthesis (TIS) models has significantly influenced digital image creation by producing high-quality visuals from written descriptions. Yet these models heavily rely on the quality and specificity of textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users who may not be familiar with TIS-model-preferred prompt writing. Existing solutions relieve this via automatic model-preferred prompt generation from user queries. However, this single-turn manner suffers from limited user-centricity in terms of result interpretability and user interactivity. To address these issues, we propose DialPrompt, a multi-turn dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasises user-centricity. DialPrompt is designed to follow a multi-turn guidance workflow, where in each round of dialogue the model queries user with their preferences on possible optimization dimensions before generating the final TIS prompt. To achieve this, we mined 15 essential dimensions for high-quality prompts from advanced users and curated a multi-turn dataset. Through training on this dataset, DialPrompt can improve interpretability by allowing users to understand the correlation between specific phrases and image attributes. Additionally, it enables greater user control and engagement in the prompt generation process, leading to more personalized and visually satisfying outputs. Experiments indicate that DialPrompt achieves a competitive result in the quality of synthesized images, outperforming existing prompt engineering approaches by 5.7%. Furthermore, in our user evaluation, DialPrompt outperforms existing approaches by 46.5% in user-centricity score and is rated 7.9/10 by 19 human reviewers.

The rapid dissemination of misinformation on the internet complicates the decision-making process for individuals seeking reliable information, particularly parents researching child development topics. This misinformation can lead to adverse consequences, such as inappropriate treatment of children based on myths. While previous research has utilized text-mining techniques to predict child abuse cases, there has been a gap in the analysis of child development myths and facts. This study addresses this gap by applying text mining techniques and classification models to distinguish between myths and facts about child development, leveraging newly gathered data from publicly available websites. The research methodology involved several stages. First, text mining techniques were employed to pre-process the data, ensuring enhanced accuracy. Subsequently, the structured data was analysed using six robust Machine Learning (ML) classifiers and one Deep Learning (DL) model, with two feature extraction techniques applied to assess their performance across three different training-testing splits. To ensure the reliability of the results, cross-validation was performed using both k-fold and leave-one-out methods. Among the classification models tested, Logistic Regression (LR) demonstrated the highest accuracy, achieving a 90% accuracy with the Bag-of-Words (BoW) feature extraction technique. LR stands out for its exceptional speed and efficiency, maintaining low testing time per statement (0.97 microseconds). These findings suggest that LR, when combined with BoW, is effective in accurately classifying child development information, thus providing a valuable tool for combating misinformation and assisting parents in making informed decisions.

The disparity between news stories valued by journalists and those preferred by readers, known as the "News Gap", is well-documented. However, the difference in expectations regarding news related user-generated content is less studied. Comment sections, hosted by news websites, are popular venues for reader engagement, yet still subject to editorial decisions. It is thus important to understand journalist vs reader comment preferences and how these are served by various comment ranking algorithms that represent discussions differently. We analyse 1.2 million comments from Austrian newspaper Der Standard to understand the "News Comment Gap" and the effects of different ranking algorithms. We find that journalists prefer positive, timely, complex, direct responses, while readers favour comments similar to article content from elite authors. We introduce the versatile Feature-Oriented Ranking Utility Metric (FORUM) to assess the impact of different ranking algorithms and find dramatic differences in how they prioritise the display of comments by sentiment, topical relevance, lexical diversity, and readability. Journalists can exert substantial influence over the discourse through both curatorial and algorithmic means. Understanding these choices' implications is vital in fostering engaging and civil discussions while aligning with journalistic objectives, especially given the increasing legal scrutiny and societal importance of online discourse.

Alignment approaches such as RLHF and DPO are actively investigated to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Commercial large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have been recently employed to evaluate and compare different LLM alignment approaches. These models act as surrogates for human evaluators due to their promising abilities to approximate human preferences with remarkably faster feedback and lower costs. This methodology is referred to as LLM-as-a-judge. However, concerns regarding its reliability have emerged, attributed to LLM judges' biases and inconsistent decision-making. Previous research has sought to develop robust evaluation frameworks for assessing the reliability of LLM judges and their alignment with human preferences. However, the employed evaluation metrics often lack adequate explainability and fail to address the internal inconsistency of LLMs. Additionally, existing studies inadequately explore the impact of various prompt templates when applying LLM-as-a-judge methods, which leads to potentially inconsistent comparisons between different alignment algorithms. In this work, we systematically evaluate LLM judges on alignment tasks (e.g. summarization) by defining evaluation metrics with improved theoretical interpretability and disentangling reliability metrics with LLM internal inconsistency. We develop a framework to evaluate, compare, and visualize the reliability and alignment of LLM judges to provide informative observations that help choose LLM judges for alignment tasks. Our results indicate a significant impact of prompt templates on LLM judge performance, as well as a mediocre alignment level between the tested LLM judges and human evaluators.

Stories about AI-generated political content are like stories about people drunkenly setting off fireworks: There's a good chance they'll end in disaster. WIRED is tracking AI usage in political campaigns across the world, and so far examples include pornographic deepfakes and misinformation-spewing chatbots. It's gotten to the point where the US Federal Communications Commission has proposed mandatory disclosures for AI use in television and radio ads. Despite concerns, some US political campaigns are embracing generative AI tools. There's a growing category of AI-generated political content flying under the radar this election cycle, developed by startups including Denver-based BattlegroundAI, which uses generative AI to come up with digital advertising copy at a rapid clip.

Google's new superphone goes all out on battery, camera and smarts, leading a new line of Android devices that can run the company's Gemini AI system with a next-generation conversational voice assistant that is a huge leap forward. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is the biggest normal phone Google makes, costing from 1,099 ( 1,199/ 1,099/A 1,849) and is joined for the first time this year by a smaller 9 Pro model with the same specs and camera costing 999 ( 1,099/ 999/A 1,699). The XL is therefore for people who want a huge screen and big battery.